The present disclosure relates to a method and system for optimizing market coverage in a system for facilitating call connections between a user and a target. For the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, references will be made to examples of applications for making sales calls. However, one of ordinary skill in the art will understand that the concepts described herein are applicable to any number of different fields, including, but not limited to, any contact relationship management system, telephone surveys, telephone number verification, census information gathering activities, fund raising campaigns, political campaigns, or any combination thereof.
An automated system for telephonically conducting simultaneous calling sessions on behalf of many users will involve calling attempts on separate successive sessions, which may be separated by a number of days, weeks, or in some cases, even months. An example of an automated system for facilitating telephone call connections between a user and a prospect is described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2007/0121902 A1, published May 31, 2007, entitled TRANSFER OF LIVE CALLS, based upon application Ser. No. 11/556,301, filed Nov. 3, 2006, the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Many companies, non-profit organizations and government entities regularly call people at their place of work. These calls are often intended to identify opportunities to sell one or more products, but are also made to solicit donations, conduct market research or collect owed money. Many of these calls are made to someone known to the calling organization, and for whom contact information such as name, company name, title and one or more telephone numbers are available. However, it is often desirable to have telephone conversations with people who are not individually known to the calling organization, but who have a title or job role at a company that may have a need for one or more products being sold by the calling organization.
These kinds of calls, usually called “cold calls”, are typically made by acquiring a list of contacts from a list vendor or aggregator of contact data such as Data.com, Hoovers or Zoom Info. Such lead lists typically have high rates of outdated and incorrect information. Industry data shows that more than 20 call attempts are required on average to get a live telephone conversation with a targeted person. Thus, inaccurate or outdated contact information in a calling list wastes time that could have been better spent in trying to reach valid contacts, or in actual sales conversations. These dead end call attempts also frustrate and hurt the morale and impair the earnings of the callers, who are usually sales representatives that are compensated based on successful conversation outcomes.
In addition, while an acquired lead list can usually be filtered by attributes such as job title, industry, and company size in order to more accurately target calling campaigns, these lists do not provide any information that helps identify targets who might be more ready to buy a specific product because of an event or change in circumstance. For example, a company that has recently opened a new office would be more likely to be in the market for a coffee delivery service; or a company that just bought a Salesforce Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, system might be interested in buying CRM consulting services. These kinds of events and changes of circumstance can be thought of as contextual clues that provide evidence that a specific company or individual person is likely to be more receptive to a specific sales offer. These contextual clues are often very time sensitive, and can quickly become obsolete when the need of the moment is fulfilled and the potential buyer moves on to solve other problems.
Calling organizations often recognize the value of using time sensitive contextual clues for identifying higher quality leads on which to spend their valuable calling resources, and they often provide their sales representatives with Internet-based research tools such as InsideView or RainKing, supplemented by generic search tools such as Google or Bing and by services such as LinkedIn that provide information about individual people. This research is typically done for a combination of a company and contact on an acquired calling list immediately before a call attempt. These tools, in aggregate, are commonly referred to as ‘lead generation’ or ‘leadgen’. Unfortunately, because more than 95 percent of call attempts do not result in a conversation, most of this leadgen process is wasted or its effectiveness is reduced because of the delay between the research and the actual conversation, if any.
Complicating the challenge of identifying contextual clues and responding to them in a timely manner is the administrative burden thrust upon the calling organization to manage this extremely dynamic information in a manner that supports the organization's territory policy and design. Most companies organize their sales reps into distinct ‘geographies’ with no overlap between reps. Factors such as industry, company size, functional roles within an organization, product line and location are common factors used to design these rep territories. Organizations with many sales reps and some degree of turnover across those reps can struggle with the constant need to align customers and opportunities to the shape-shifting of their sales organization. When territory requirements are extended in front of customers, to the much larger population of potential customers, often called ‘prospects’, the complexities and administrative cost can become overwhelming.
Organization's that go to the extraordinary efforts to extend territory policy management into their leadgen efforts can often suffer from the unintended consequence of now being fully reliant on the whims of their reps to cover leads in the necessary time sensitive manner. Given that sales reps go through a natural cycle, that can often take weeks, months or quarters, of finding new opportunities via prospecting, spending time ensuring a proper product fit via qualifying, engaging in a sales process and negotiating a purchase, it is common that leads are delivered to a sales rep when their effort is in a different portion of their sales lifecycle. As a result, huge portions of time sensitive leads can lay fallow, never having been spoken with by a sales rep before their value expires. This frequent scenario can be incredibly frustrating and costly to the calling organization given the time and expense it has gone through to provide the leadgen function to sales.
Customer relationship management (“CRM”) systems are typically used as master repositories for customer and prospect information. When using an automated calling process, the user has conversations with prospects that need to be correctly recorded in a CRM system, such as logging the call, setting a status field on the lead or contact record to indicate that at least one conversation has taken place, and creating a task record for follow up action. These updates need to be performed in a way that allows the user to mix automated calling sessions with unscheduled manual dialing and scheduled meetings in a coordinated way that avoids conflicts, such as calling a prospect back too early, or before an agreed-upon next step has been taken.
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved system and methods for better identifying and timing a caller's outreach to a target that optimizes market coverage. Such a system will better identify potential customers with a propensity to purchase the goods/services of the caller.